Well, how times have changed. I remember Digital Equipment Corp. had a major celebration when we released the DEC Alpha "EV4" running at 200MHz. This sounds kind of slow when PC processors are now running at a few GIGA-Hertz, but at that time, the competitors' CPUs were chugging along at ... 60MHz or so. The DEC teams used all the tricks they had to achieve that. The price of that processor were in the multi-thousands.

And now we have the STM32F746 MCU, with so many GPIOs, Timers, and plethora of peripherals, all for about $10:

Progress!!

p.s. this is from porting the JumpStart API to the F7xx series. The demo is done with just a few lines of JumpStart API code, vs. pages of code using ST's HAL library.

Nuts & Volts is the leading magazine for those seriously interested in electronics. in their March 2016 issue, Fred Eady reviews JumpStart API and JumpStart C for Cortex-M. You can see the article here.